'Re-Visions': Vaidehi's "An Afternoon with Shakuntala" and Mannu Bhandari's "Swami"

Comparative Civilizations Review Volume 42 Number 42 Spring 2000 Article 5 4-1-2000 Feminist 'Re-Membering' and 'Re-Visions': Vaidehi's "An Afternoon with Shakuntala" and Mannu Bhandari's "Swami" Jyoti Panjwani Eastern Illinois University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr Recommended Citation Panjwani, Jyoti (2000) "Feminist 'Re-Membering' and 'Re-Visions': Vaidehi's "An Afternoon with Shakuntala" and Mannu Bhandari's "Swami"," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 42 : No. 42 , Article 5. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol42/iss42/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Civilizations Review by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Panjwani: Feminist 'Re-Membering' and 'Re-Visions': Vaidehi's "An Afternoon 46 COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONS REVIEW Feminist 'Re-Membering' and 'Re-Visions': Vaidehi's "An Afternoon with Shakuntala" and Mannu Bhandari's "Swami" JYOTI PANJWANI The Feminist movement in India is, undoubtedly, a direct outcome of the British rule and the consequent nationalist struggle for independence. The ideology of nationalism in postcolonial India constructs the Indian women's need to locate their tools of self-reliance and self-hood. Indian feminism, in this sense, nuances the postcolonial act of 're-visioning' the notions of self- identity and freedom. Re-visioning for the postcolonialists and the Indian feminists becomes a way of creating self- conscious- ness of who and what 'they really are' instead of relying on 'external agencies' to define it for them. This external agency for the Indian feminists, unlike the Indian postcolonialists, is not the English colonizers but the Indian traditional/patriarchal structure itself that has preceded and continues after colonialism. The process of decolonization, thereby, is also manifested in the female demands for equality. This paper by analyzing the 'revisions' of two male texts, namely, Kalidasa's Sanskrit play Abijnanasakuntalam (5th Century AD) and Saratchandra Chatterjee's Bengali story "Swami" (1918) by two postcolonial women writers, Vaidehi (Janaki Srinivas Murthy) and Mannu Bhandari respectively, tries to establish that postcolonial Indian feminist criticism offers us radically altered readings of male texts. It is the patriarchal Indian tradition that furnishes the backdrop to the resistant and 'insur- rectionary' readings of contemporary Indian feminist writers and critics. The focus of this analysis, therefore, is to show how Vaidehi, in her Kannada story entitled "Shakuntale Yondige Kaleda Aparahna" (1986), translated in English as "An Afternoon with Shakuntala" (1993), and Mannu Bhandari, in her Hindi story, "Swami" (1982), refashion the earlier two male texts Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2000 1 Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 42 [2000], No. 42, Art. 5 J YOU PANJWANI 47 by subverting the plot and the characterization to pave the way for greater self-reliance among women and to contest readings that do not allow women agency, self-determination, and freedom. This subversive revision, according to Adrienne Rich, is "an act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text [patriarchal text] from a new critical direction...and knowing it differently than we have ever known it, [so that we do not] pass on a tradition but...break its hold over us" (35). Feminism, in the context of these two revisions, "could [also] be described as narratives about the discovery of representation itself' (John, 19). Women's histories in patriarchal societies have either been ignored or recorded partially, in the sense that they omit the voic- es of women and tell women's stories from the male point of view. As traditionalists, both Saratchandra Chatterjee and Kalidasa present stories and images of erring women, neglectful of their duties, who must suffer to repent their mistakes. Their reformation restores the traditional order of a patriarchal society. The two postcolonial Indian women writers, Vaidehi and Bhandari, negate these images of erring women. Gerda Lerner in her book, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), describes this ten- sion between women's actual historical experience and their exclusion from interpreting that experience as "the dialectic of women's history". According to Lerner, this dialectic has moved women forward in the historical process and she says, "This com- ing- into-consciousness of women becomes the dialectical force moving them into action to change their condition and to enter a new relationship to male dominated society" (Lerner 5). Vaidehi revises the representation of a traditional Indian woman and shows how Shakuntala and her story are misrepresented by Kalidasa. Bhandari revises the representation of a modern Indian woman, the so- called 'new woman,' and shows how Saudamini, as an educated woman, is mistreated by Saratchandra Chatterjee. Both the women writers, through their revisions, illustrate what Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan in her book, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (1993), asserts that https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol42/iss42/5 2 Panjwani: Feminist 'Re-Membering' and 'Re-Visions': Vaidehi's "An Afternoon 48 COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONS REVIEW in the postcolonial Indian society, (a) ... the female [continues] to be constructed, (b) ... the terms of such construction are to be sought in the dominant modes of ideology (patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism), and therefore (c)... what is at stake is ... the politics of control that representation both signifies and serves. [Hence] the task of the feminist critic becomes the critique of male discourse (Rajan 129). Kalidasa's play, Abhijnanasakuntalam, can be fruitfully stud- ied in the light of the dramatic conventions compiled by Bharata in his Natyashastra. Kalidasa's play, in terms of characterization of the male and female protagonists and the technical details of the plot, is tailored to the traditional requirements of the Sanskrit nataka. So, in that sense, Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntalam is contextualized in a very traditional framework. But Kalidasa's innovation lies in his treatment of the mythical story of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, and in his use of a rich array of images and metaphors. Vaidehi (b. 1945) in her short story "An Afternoon with Shakuntala" subverts his treatment of the story of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, his imagery and the characterization. Her inversion questions the cogency of the traditional norms and codes of behavior laid out for male and female characters. Commenting on the relationship between Feminism and 'revision', Chandra Talpade Mohanty in the "Introduction" to her book, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, says: Feminist analysis has always recognized the centrality of rewriting and remembering history. This process is significant... because the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of....consciousness and self- identity...It becomes a space for struggle and contestation about reality itself (34). Vaidehi's 'revision' creates the feminist space that struggles to retrieve 'reality' that has been repressed by the dominant 'other' and it does so by documenting a woman's awareness of her 'self' and its contradiction by the way it has been perceived by the 'other'. This documentation echoes the postcolonial critique of the 'civilized' colonizer's justification for colonizing the native who appears to be 'barbaric' because the colonizer blindly Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2000 3 Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 42 [2000], No. 42, Art. 5 J YOU PANJWANI 49 fails to understand the native's mind and culture. Vaidehi fulfills the task of eradicating this misunderstanding by allowing Shakuntala to reveal the other side of her story, as things 'really' happened to her, to a sympathetic (feminist?) visitor from the twentieth- century, to correct the presentation of the events of her life as depicted in Kalidasa's play. Vaidehi's story is presented to its readers from the outset as a text 'written from memory' and is meant to show Kalidasa's account of Shakuntala's life as inher- ently flawed and misrecorded. According to Vaidehi's Shakuntala, the poet has concealed the "truths" by using super- natural interventions in order to justify Dushyanta's actions as a righteous king. By allowing Shakuntala to tell her story, Vaidehi points to the women's need of demythifying traditional representations of women and involving themselves in a revolutionary myth-making process where women do not get depicted as help- less, erring beings because that is not the way they 'really' are. The awareness of what they really are or are capable of being, inevitably, initiates a journey into the historical past which has created and defined the woman's self. Hence, it is not a coinci- dence that both the feminist 're-visions', discussed in this paper, re-search the mythical and the historical representations of female characters. Kalidasa borrows the plot of his play from the story of Shakuntala and Dushyanta from the longest Indian epic, Mahabharata by Muni Vyasa, where Dushyanta has been afraid to send for Shakuntala, and as the years passed the memory of the hermit girl has slowly faded away. But when she appears before him with her grown-up boy, he remembers alright, but afraid of incurring the blame of

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